A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Thursday, January 31, 2013

While I have been absent from this blog, caring for Susie,
politics in America has taken an interesting turn.Obama has now staked out three big issues as
his agenda for the second term:climate
change, immigration reform, and gun control.One of these -- climate change -- is a matter of the very greatest
importance on which the United States by itself can have some effect, but not
an enormous effect.The other two issues
are relatively minor in comparison with economic recovery and the rampant
growth of inequality in America, but they are both important, and in each case
there is some reason to hope for positive legislative steps.

Far and away the most important political news is the
decision by the Obama campaign machine to turn over its enormous database to a
new lobbying organization, Organizing for America.As I have said repeatedly on this blog, the
only real prospect for any sort of progressive movement in this country is the
mobilization of the scores of millions of people who are already persuaded of
some form of progressive politics.Let
us be clear.This has nothing to do with
reversing the sixty year old imperial thrust of U. S. foreign policy, nor does
it have anything to do with advancing the prospects for the emergence of
socialism from the decaying carcass of capitalism [I love saying things like
that].But we on the left have been playing
defense for so long that it feels good even to think about winning a few small
victories.

Those of you who cannot be bothered trying to make the world
just a little bit better can go on saying "A pox on both your
houses."I have several times
explained why I choose not to follow that course.Bad as things are in this country -- and they
really are very, very bad in a variety of ways -- there is a serious
possibility that they will get a very great deal worse unless we can stop those
who are trying to complete the transformation of America into a gated banana
republic.

I think there are reasons for hope.But even if we are successful beyond our
wildest dreams, this country will still be nothing like what I would want it to
be.For example, even if the proponents
of a single payer health care system had won the day in Obama's first term --
and it is clear that there was never the slightest chance of that happening --
we would still only have managed to put in place an expensive variant of the
health care system that is routine in Europe and elsewhere.That tells you a great deal about how limited
our real options are.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

My apologies for being absent from this site. Looking after Susie with her broken shoulder is more time-consuming than I had anticipated, and in my spare time I have begun writing the remarks I will offer to the Duke group eventually. Who was it who said, "If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"? [The web credits it variously to Hemingway, Cicero, Voltaire, Mark Twain, and Blaise Pascal!] It turns out to be extremely demanding to compress forty years of work into a forty-five minute presentation. Nevertheless, the effort is worthwhile, because I have never before attempted to bring together in a single integrated narrative my literary critical exegeses from Moneybags and "Narrative Time," my mathematical reinterpretation and revision of Marx's economic theories from Understanding Marx and "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value," and the arguments of "The Future of Socialism" and "The Indexing Problem." My only hope is that someone in the audience will find what I have to say suggestive.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Some
folks from several Duke University departments have organized something that
they call "The Political Theory Working Group."They meet regularly throughout the year and
then hold a two day conference in the Spring.One of the organizers, Michael Gillespie, recently invited me to speak
at this year's conference, in April.I
was, needless to say, flattered by the invitation, and my initial inclination
was to agree.But then he told me
something of what they have been focusing on, and I started to have
doubts."This year's theme for the
conference," he wrote to me in an email message, "is 'Community and
Emergent Order in Non-State Spaces: Cinematic, Literary, and Philosophical
Approaches.'"Right away, I began
to have qualms.What on earth do I know
about cinematic, literary, and philosophical approaches to community and
emergent order in non-state spaces?

My doubts
morphed into dismay when Gillespie told me what the group has been up to this
year." Over the course of the
academic year, the Working Group will have watched a dozen films/TV episodes
that have been paired with theoretical and philosophic readings dealing
directly or indirectly with non-state spaces: The Wild Bunch & Deadwood
(readings by you and from Anderson and Hill's The Not So Wild Wild West);
Hotel Rwanda & The Battle of Algiers (readings from Fanon and
Thucydides); Serenity & Avatar (readings from Rousseau's Second
Discourse and James C Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed); The
Godfather & The Wire (readings from Hobbes's Leviathan and Franz
Oppenheimer's The State); The Bridge on the River Quai & One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest (readings from R. A. Radford on the "Economic
Organization of the Prison Camp" and from Szasz's The Myth of Mental
Illness); Rabbit-Proof Fence and Beasts of the Southern Wild
(readings yet to be determined, but likely from Pierre Clastres and Rebecca
Solnit)."

Readings
by me in conjunction with The Wild Bunch
and Deadwood?I had to Google them to find out what they
are.[One is a Sam Peckinpah movie from
1969.The other is a TV show.]It was obvious that I was way out of my
league.What on earth could I possibly
talk about that would have the slightest connection to this kind of sophisticated
kulturkritik?

I demurred,
Gillespie said all manner of kind things to reassure me, and I finally allowed
as how I wanted to talk about the relationship between language and social
reality in Marx, with my remarks touching on economics, linear algebra, literary
criticism, and commodity fetishism."Swell," he said, and I was well and truly sunk.

For my
entire career, my worst nightmare has been standing up at a lectern and droning
on about something the audience really does not want to hear.Only several times in the past fifty or sixty
years has that nightmare come true.Once
was at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where I presented myself to
deliver an invited lecture, only to find the large hall in which I was to speak
deserted save for a scattering of perhaps eleven souls, five or so of whom got
up in the middle of the talk and walked out.It was not until after the disaster was ended that my hosts explained:It seems that the Baltimore Colts were
playing a crucial game at precisely the hour of my talk, and it was, they said
soothingly, a testimony to my star quality that anybody at all had shown up.

What am I
going to say, come April?Well, I am
going to pull together a number of things I have written about Capital, in two books and several
articles, and try to explain in forty-five minutes what I mean when I say that Marx
needed to find a language and a mathematics sufficiently rich in syntactic and
rhetorical resources to give expression to his complex understanding of
capitalist social and economic reality. Are there "cinematic approaches"
that can be paired with this talk?Maybe
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times [which
I have not actually seen straight through], or the famous episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucille Ball
struggles to keep up with a conveyor belt in a cake factory.

Something
tells me this is going to be another disaster, on a par with the UMBC fiasco.

Monday, January 21, 2013

My seven year old son Samuel has become a rabid fan of his home town football team, The San Francisco Forty-Niners. This threatened to pose a problem of major proportions, because if the Niners won their NFC championship game against the Falcons and my team, the New England Patriots, won their AFC championship game against the Baltimore Ravens, as they seemed sure to do, Samuel and I would be rooting for opposing teams in the Super Bowl two weeks from now. Well, the Niners beat the Falcons, but my Patriots, despite being up 13-7 at halftime, managed to lose to Falco and the Ravens. Whew.

All of us, I trust, recall the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, entitled
"The Scouring of the Shire."Frodo and his intrepid little band of hobbits have returned to the Shire
from their extraordinary adventures to find a pair of scalawags terrorizing
their idyllic community.Grima
Wormtongue, the evil, twisted, conspiratorial advisor to King Theoden, and
Saruman, the powerful wizard who turned to Sauron and what in other contexts
would be called the dark side of the Force, have been defeated and
deposed.They are now reduced totyrannizing over innocent hobbits with cheap magician's
tricks and schoolyard bullying.Frodo,
Sam, Merry and the others have no difficulty rousting them and driving them
from the Shire.I have long cherished
this lovely fillip at the end of the saga as a literary representation of
pomposity and self-importance brought low.

This was called to my mind this morning by yet another
circular e-mail from Henry Louis Gates.I have made it onto what is undoubtedly an enormous distribution list
compiled by Gates, presumably because my email address still identifies me as a
member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the
University of Massachusetts.Gates burst
on the scene with a genuinely interesting book, The Signifying Monkey, and after a bit of academic peripatetics,
settled at Harvard as Chair of their languishing Afro-Am Department.Gates proceeded to assemble what he rather
grandiosely called his Dream Team [a term appropriately applied to the group of
American superstars who won the first Olympic basketball competition.]In short order, the department launched a
doctoral program most notable for the fact that it required all of its graduate
students to earn an M. A. in another department [thereby making clear the
department's belief that it was not the home of a real academic
discipline.]After his maiden
publication, Gates has never done another serious piece of real research,
instead spending his time on endless editing efforts and television promotions,
all of which are characterized by an insatiable hunger for publicity and a
singular absence of taste.In those
early years at Harvard, one of his proudest boasts was that he had lunched with
Tina Brown, then the editor of The New
Yorker.One of the interesting aspects
of Gates' career is that he has no discoverable relationship to the Black
community, unlike his quondam
colleague, Cornell West, who, despite his pyrotechnic self-promotion, has
genuine roots in the Black church.

The email is titled "Amazing Fact
#15: Where Was the First Underground Railroad?"It is to this that the Alphonse Fletcher
University Professor at Harvard University is reduced.It can surely not be long before a line of
commemorative coins, "suitable for framing," appears under his name,
together with a collector's edition of Little
Black Sambo.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Today I should like to celebrate two anniversaries. The first and far and away more important of the two is that today, January 16, 2013, is the eightieth birthday of my wife, Susie. Faithful readers of my autobiography [of whom there may be one or two] will know that Susie and I met sixty-five years ago as high school sophomores, at Forest Hills High School in Queens, New York. I fell in love with her then, and we "went steady" [as one used to say] for five years, until, at about the time I was graduating from Harvard, we broke up. Fast forward thirty-five years. When my first marriage ended, I went looking for her, we found we were still in love, and in 1987 were married. This is a rather bittersweet moment because a week ago, while taking a walk, Susie slipped on some wet leaves and fractured her shoulder. She does not need surgery, thank heaven, but the injury is very, very painful and doctors say it will be six or eight weeks before she is healed. Nevertheless, by late Spring, she will be fit again, and we shall set off for Paris.The second anniversary is not pegged to this day, but rather to all of 2013. It is now just fifty years since I published Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, the first of what would eventually be twenty-one books. One is always somewhat soft on one's first born, and I still think, after all these years, that it is a good book. There are several events scheduled today with Susie's children and grandchildren to celebrate her eightieth. No events have been scheduled for the book.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I am an early riser.I get up at five, sometimes earlier.This is considered virtuous, but of course it is nothing of the
sort.After all, I go to bed typically
at eight p.m. or so [with an hour or more up in the middle of the night-- when
you are seventy-nine, you will understand.]It was not always so.As a young
student at Harvard, in the very early fifties, I did not even begin to study
until close to midnight.Then I would
work feverishly until four or five a.m., and fall into bed exhausted.In those days, bankers kept bankers' hours,
and banks closed at 2 p.m.I had to make
plans to get to the bank on time to make a withdrawal [this was before ATM
machines.]

The Army changed all that.In Basic Training, they got me up roughly when I had been accustomed to
go to sleep.After six months [that was
all the active duty I had to put in as a member of the Yankee Division of the
Massachusetts National Guard], I was totally turned around.By the time my Instructorship started at
Harvard, I was getting to my office at 7 a.m. to prepare for my ten o'clock
class.[I needed that much time because
I was teaching European History, a subject about which I had known nothing when
offered the job.]

All of which explains why I never see prime time
television.I cannot even manage to stay
up long enough to see The Rachel Maddow Show from eight to nine.I catch it the next day on my computer.

But I have Netflix, and in addition to movies, Netflix
offers runs of evening adventure and cop type shows.A while back, I stumbled on Bones.I watched about seven seasons of the show, several a day or even more,
waiting with bated breath for Seeley Booth and Temperance Brennan to get it
on.When they finally fell into bed and
had a baby, I sort of lost interest.

My latest obsession is Alias,
a rather weird spy show that ran from 2001 to 2006 and made Jennifer Garner a
star.[One of the odd things, for me at
least, is that "Jennifer Garner" is the name of the Associate Registrar
at Bennett College, a lovely lady who, to the best of my knowledge, is not adept
at kick-boxing and is not a double agent for the CIA -- but then, how would I
know if she were?]I did not even know
that Alias existed until Netflix,
which keeps careful track of what I click on, suggested several weeks ago that
I might enjoy the show.I am probably
the only sentient human on the face of the earth who was unaware of the show's
existence, but since it is totally unhinged from reality, it does not really
matter whether I watch episodes as they appear or ten years later.I have now worked my way through the first
season [twenty-one episodes] and am well into the second season.

Like all successful shows, whether Soaps or prime time series,
Alias is essentially an endless
examination of the interpersonal relationships of a dysfunctional family [cue
the opening line of Anna Karenina.]In the
case of Alias, the core family is a
CIA double agent [the father] who has infiltrated a rogue operation
masquerading as a CIA off-the-books black ops shop but is really part of an
international alliance of bad guys rather unimaginatively called The Alliance,
a KGB secret agent who seduced the CIA agent in order to obtain information
about a plan to train six year old kids as spies, bore the CIA agent a daughter,
faked her own death, and has been a super bad guy ever since [the mother], and
the star of the show [the daughter], who is, like all little girls, trying to
sort out her feelings for her mother and her father.The daughter is a double agent who specializes
in kick-boxing and seems to speak about eighteen languages flawlessly.Her cover is that she is doing a doctorate in
English Lit, which -- this is the only realistic element in the entire show --
does not take much of her time.

Stylistically, the show is a crossed between the James Bond
movies, with each episode featuring travelogue-quality scenes of exotic
locations, and the Mission Impossible movies, in which the main character is
adept at every possible special skill useful to spies, from lock-picking and
bomb-defusing to rappelling down skyscrapers and performing on-the-spot
surgery.

Jennifer Garner is lovely and suitably forlorn as the heroine,
but I have really fallen in love with Lena Olin, who surfaces late in the first
season as the mother [her husband, Ken Olin, seems to have directed a good many
of the episodes.]Olin is beautiful, and
enough closer to my own age to permit me the sorts of fantasies I could never
have about someone as unformed as Jennifer Garner.She is also a terrific actress, so that just
watching the succession of expressions that flicker across her face is a
pleasure.

The show is rather complex and ambiguous morally [the
principal bad guy gets a lot of screen time and is touchingly devoted to his
wife, which makes hating him a bit challenging], but the plotting is formulaic
to the max.The fourth or fifth time
Jennifer Garner disarms a professional assassin holding a gun on her with an
implausible kick-boxing move, your suspension of disbelief becomes a bit less
willing.

The show has once again confirmed my basic judgment about
great works of literature, which is that they are well-written soap operas or
crime shows.I mean, the torments of
Oedipus and Hamlet are not, psychodynamically, that different from those of
Nick Newman in The Young and the Restless.

Let me turn, finally, to a third example drawn from
a very different sphere, namely Gerald Cohen’s attempt in his important book, KARL
MARX'S THEORY OF HISTORY, to define an objective measure of the increase in
productivity of an economy. Cohen undertakes to defend a quite orthodox,
uncomplicated version of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, one that many
would call economistic, technological, and determinist. After distinguishing,
by some careful conceptual analysis and textual exegesis, between the
productive forces of an economy and the social relations of production, Cohen
summarizes his version of Marx in two theses, which he labels the Development
Thesis and the Primacy Thesis.

The
development thesis states that ‘the productive forces tend to develop
throughout history.’ The primacy thesis offers a functional explanation of the
social relations of production in terms of their suitability for furthering the
development of the productive forces. The thesis states: ‘The nature of the
production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of
its productive forces.’ [Cohen, p.134] Cohen then goes on to give an original
and controversial defense of functional explanation in terms of what he calls
consequence laws.

Most
of the comment on Cohen’s book, not surprisingly, has concentrated on the
notion of consequence laws, but there is, it seems to me, a prior problem
concerning the development thesis, a problem which, oddly enough, involves the
same issue of indexing that we have been examining in connection with Rawls'
work and the problem of wage determination and comparable worth.

At
the risk of appearing to have wondered away from Professor Buchanan’s work into
a critique of Cohen, let me elaborate a bit the structure of Cohen’s argument,
so that we can see precisely where and how an indexing problem arises.

At
this point, since the precise statement of Cohen’s thesis will become rather
involved, I will ask you to refer to the handouts distributed at the beginning
of my remarks.

According
to Cohen, consequence laws have the following doubly hypothetical form: {see
handout, number 1}

IFit
is the case that if an event of
type E were to occur at t1, then it would bring about an event of type F at t2

THENan event of type E occurs at t3.

To
put the matter less technically and more provocatively, what explains the
occurrence of event E is the fact that if it were to occur, it would bring
about event F. Or, even more succinctly, E is explained by the fact that it is
functional for F.

Using
this formal structure we can now state Cohen’s primacy thesis in proper
consequence law form, namely:

IFit
is the case that if the production relations conductive to the use and
development of the productive forces available in a society at that time come
into being, then the productive forces available at that time will be
used and developed,

THEN the
production relations conductive to the use and development of the productive
forces available in that society at that time come into being.

To
defend his primacy thesis, Cohen must do four things. First, he must explain
what he means by ‘productive forces available in a society’ and ‘production
relations of a society’ with sufficient precision and clarity that we can tell
them apart, and also ascertain, for a given society, what productive forces are
available and what the production relations are in the society. Second, he must
explain what he means by the 'development’ of productive forces, and specify
some way of telling as between two states of affairs in society, which
constitutes a higher development of the productive forces. Third, he must
defend explanation by consequence laws in general. And finally, he must offer
some evidence or argument in support of the particular consequence laws that
express the primacy thesis. It is in his attempt to meet the second of these
needs that Cohen runs of afoul of the indexing problem, in my judgment.

Cohen
defines an increase in productivity as an increase in the quantity of product
or output that can be produced with a given amount of direct labor. For
example, in a simple one-commodity economy that uses corn and labor to produce
corn, an increase in productivity is an increase in the net output of corn per
unit input of labor.

This
measure of productivity becomes problematical, as Cohen recognizes, as soon as
there are two or more commodities being produced, for a new technique might
permit us to produce more of the first commodity but less of the second, with a
given quantity of labor. Would this be an increase, a decrease, or no change in
productivity? Some technological innovations, of course, might enable us to
produce more of every commodity with the same labor, or at least more of some
and no less of others. In those cases we could appeal to a Pareto principle to
establish a rank ordering of relative productivity. But in the general case,
some way must be found to make what Cohen calls ‘global productivity’
comparisons. Here is Cohen’s solution:

Of course, if everything producible at
stage s1 is producible at stage s2, and each thing at s2 in less
time than s1, then we need no common measure of the magnitude of
products to claim that productivity is higher at s2. But suppose forces
at s2 outclasses those at s1 with respect to some products, and
are less powerful with respect to others. How can we then make a global
productivity comparison between s1 and s2?

In certain instances of the type
just identified comparison will still be possible without a common measure of
product size. Thus supposed that at both s1 and s2 twelve hours
per day is the length of time each producer is able to labor productively:
marginal product is negative beyond that point. Imagine that there are just
three products, p, q, and r. At s1 it thakes 3 hours to produce a unit
of p, 4 hours to produce a unit of q, and 5 hours to produce a unit of r. At s2 it takes 2 hours to produce a
unit of p, 3 hours to produce a unit of q, and 6 hours to produce a unit of
r.Then s2 is more productive with
respect to p and q, and less productive with respect to r. Note, however, that only 11 of the 12 hours
available at s2 are used up when it produces one unit each of p, q, and
r. Suppose the remaining hour were
allocated to producing r: then as long as some r were produced in that hour, we
should be able to say that s2 is globally more productive than s1,
even though we have stated no ratios between units of one product and units of
any other. [Cohen, p.57]

But
Cohen’s argument is quit incorrect. To see why, let us suppose that the
technologies of s1 and s2 are just as Cohen specifies, but that
final demand for commodities p, q, and r is different from that assumed by
Cohen. In other words, let us suppose that these societies, using these
technologies, do not wish to produce one unit of each p, q, and r.

Instead,
let final demand be .75 units of p, .5 units of q, and 1.5 units of r.In that case, s1 is globally more
productive that s2, for the desired final demand requires 12 units of
labor in s2 and only 11.75 units of labor in s1.

Now
assume final demand to be one unit of p, 4/9 units of q, and 13/9 units of r. In that case, s2 and s1 are
equally globally productive, for the desired final demand requires just 12
units of labor in each system.

But
‘global productivity’ is supposed to be an objective measure of the level of
development of productive forces, independent of consumer taste and final
demand. Thus Cohen’s measure is unsatisfactory.

It
should be obvious that this result is perfectly general. For any two
technologies, one of which is more productive with respect to commodity i and
the other of which is more productive with respect with commodity j, there will
always be some final demand that makes the first technology globally more
productive, and yet a third final demand that makes them equally globally
productive.

In
fact, of course, we are presented here with exactly the same need for a
normative or evaluative principle as the basis for our indexing rule. Either we
must assume that the final demand manifested in the market by consumer behavior
has a moral sanction, so that consumer tastes will ultimately determine the
relative productivity of two stages of capitalist development – an assumption
which undermines any attempt to mount a critique of the formation of consumer
tastes- or else we must simply stipulate that some commodities are worthier
that others, and hence will count for more in the index by which we measure
productivity. For example, suppose that the advent of industrialization and the
decline of craft skills made it less costly in labor hours to produce food, but
more costly to produce hand-carved furniture. Is that technological change an
advance in productivity or not? It depends on our moral evaluation of the
relative importance of food and beautiful furniture.

Lest
we imagine that this is a purely theoretical quibble, let us reflect that
current debates about the effects of the economy on the environment are, from a
certain point of view, really arguments about the proper weights to use in an
index designed to measure increases in productivity.

I
hope it is clear from these three examples – Rawls, comparable worth, and Cohen
– both that the indexing problem arises repeatedly in theoretical and practical
contexts, and that it is always impossible to solve it in a value-neutral
manner. Here, as in so many other cases, supposedly objective formal methods of
analysis carry with them covert evaluation presuppositions which, if not
acknowledged, serve the ideological function of rationalizing particular
political or economic positions. I take this as one important example of the
general truth that politics cannot be reduced to rational administration, or
class conflict to impartial calculation.

Monday, January 14, 2013

The same indexing problem surfaces in a quite
different context, in the proposal currently being debated to award women equal
pay for jobs comparable in worth to those performed by men. It may not be
immediately obvious that the comparable worth dispute is really an argument
about indexing, but a few moments of reflection will make this clear.

Consider
a firm that employs three groups of workers: machine operators, truck drivers,
and office clerks. What wages shall it pay? The answer popular with
neo-classical economists is, of course, Let the labor market decide. The firm
should offer the lowest wage with which it can secure competent help. If the
going market price, say for machine operators, is so high that the firm cannot
make a profit when paying that wage, then it must either shift to a different
production technique or else go out of business. If some extremely simplifying
assumptions are made about the production techniques available to the firm, the
behavior of workers and consumers, and the motivation of the firm’s managers,
then in long-run equilibrium, each worker will earn a wage precisely equal to
his or her marginal product, which, under some additional strong assumptions, might
plausibly be construed as a fair wage.

There
are essentially three things wrong with this story, which you will all
recognize as the standard story told in beginning courses in economic theory.
The three things wrong with the story are, First, that it fails to establish its
normative claims even in the impossibly restrictive theoretical case of which
it is supposed to hold, Second, that it does not hold at all for theoretical
cases whose assumptions are somewhat less restrictive, and Third, that it bears
no relation at all to what happens in the real world.

For
a demonstration of the first claim, I refer you to the first chapter of David
Schweickart’s fine book, CAPITALISM OR WORK CONTROL? The third claim, that marginal productivity
theory totally fails to predict what actually happens, is widely acknowledged. For an extended discussion, you can consult
Lester Thurow’s suggestive work, GENERATING INEQUALITY, or a forthcoming Oxford
Press Book, CHOOSING THE RIGHT POND, by a young Cornell economist, Robert
Frank.

I
wish to focus my attention on the second problem – the inadequacy of marginal
productivity theory for more complicated theoretical cases. What I wish to show
you is that under certain theoretical assumptions designed to model more
accurately the modern firm, a problem of wages policy arises which, in its
broadest outlines, is inescapably normative, and in which the issue of
comparable worth plays a central role. There, as we shall see, indexing again
proves to be the stumbling block.

So
long as firms are small, single-product producers purchasing all inputs,
including semi-finished parts, at competitive market prices, performing a
single transformation on the inputs, and selling the output at the same
competitive prices, the theory of wage determination is relatively simple. But
things go seriously awry as soon as firms grow large enough to engage in
multi-stage production processes with joint product outputs.

Consider
a meatpacking firm, for example, that fattens the cattle, slaughters them,
butchers the carcasses, packs the cuts of meat, and tans the hides. The
managers of the firm must ascertain, by means if their internal accounting
system, how much of the total cost of the firm to allocate to each final
product, and also what prices to place on intermediate products within the firm
for purpose of cost accounting.

Under
these circumstances, it is theoretically impossible to determine the marginal
productivity of a worker. Indeed, as firms grow into large bureaucratically
organized institutions, it may in practice be impossible to identify any change
in final output that can be associated with the presence or absence of a
particular employee. Clearly, what is required is a positive wage policy which
dictates what level of compensation is to be associated with each position in
the firm.

The
first rule that suggests itself – a normative rule, be it noted – is equal pay
for equal work, where equal work is interpreted as meaning the occupying of
bureaucratically identical positions. All beginning truck drivers, all clerks
of grade three, all machine operators working the same machines, will receive
equal pay. It is a good deal harder than one might think to come up with a
moral rationale for this principle, although considerations of prudence and
labor/management peace might suggest it. If the firm were dispensing justice,
then one might invoke familiar considerations of procedural fairness, but in a
competitive economy, mutual self-interest, and not justice, is supposed to
regulate the relations between labor and management.

But
equal pay for identical job position, although a principle capable of
revolutionary potential in some circumstances, does not even begin to solve the
problem of formulating a wages policy. From a formal point of view, that
principle merely groups the workers into equivalence classes, without saying
anything about the relative circumstances to be paid to the several classes.
Paying all truck drivers the same wage and all file clerks the same wage leaves
undetermined which class shall make more, and by how much.

Some
progress can be made by invoking Pareto comparability, assuming that there is
agreement on the dimensions along which different positions are to be compared.
If machine operating requires the same physical effort as truck driving, more responsibility,
at least as much dexterity, and more attentiveness, andif these are
the only qualities or characteristics of the work process which ought to count
in determining wage levels, then we can agree that machine operators ought
to make more than truck drivers.

But
now the old familiar indexing problems reappear! How shall we compare machine
operators with office workers, whose job demands greater literacy skills, less
physical effort, more independence of judgment, less manual dexterity, and
roughly the same degree of attentiveness? Once again, we must define an index
which allows us to map heterogeneous characteristics onto a one-dimensional
measure.

This
is by no means an issue of purely theoretical significance; you may be
interested to learn. In a number of large corporations in this country, top
management has found it necessary to develop a detailed policy of compensation
and raises which will possess some objective bureaucratic rationale and be
perceived as fair by the employees affected. In response to this need, a number
of management consultant firms, such as the Hay Company, have developed systems
of job evaluation designed to generate a unidimensional index, or numerical
measure, of the relative difficulty of the jobs performed by employees,
particularly at the lower and middle management levels.

Consider,
as an example, Sears, Roebucks, and Company, the great retail merchandising
firm. Sears employs thousands of men and women who occupy such job positions as
store manager, large appliances salesman, overhead fan buyer, truck driver,
cashier, and vice president in charge of the Middle Western states. These are
manifestly incommensurable jobs, requiring skills, talents, efforts and
personal characteristics that vary along many dimensions. Sears faces two
problems with regard to formulating a compensation policy in the face of this
diversity: First, at any given time, what wages or salary shall it pay each
position, and how shall it justify that compensation; and Second, how shall it
determine what relative raise to give each position annually?

Along
comes the Hay Company with a systematic answer. A middle level executive at
Sears – who, as it happens, is currently my brother-in-law – is assigned the
task of evaluating each of the hundreds of positions in the Sears system. This
executive travels around the country making on-site inspections. He assigns to
each job so many points for the amount of physical effort required, so many
points for the manual dexterity required, so many points for independence of
judgment, imagination, responsibility, direction of subordinates, and so forth,
all according to a complex process provided by Hay. He totals the assignments and arrives thereby
at the index of Hay points [as they are called] associated with each position.
The top management then decides how many dollars in compensation will be paid
per Hay point throughout the corporation, and a simple multiplication gives the
salary the Sears will pay to anyone occupying the position. If the position of
manager of a “B” store earns 5,134 Hay points, and if Sears decides to pay
eleven dollars a point, then any manager of a “B” store will be paid 56,474
dollars.

As
for raises, Sears at the end of each year chooses an amount – let us say 87
cents – which it will pay per Hay point as a raise. Our store manager then
receives a raise of 4,466.58.

How
does the Hay Company, or my brother-in-law, decide, when implementing this
system, how much weight to assign to industry, initiative, independence, manual
dexterity, or the ability to operate a word processor? It should by now be
obvious that the answer cannot possibly be in terms of relative profitability
to the firm of its employees’ possession of these various characteristics. If
anyone could actually ascertain directly such a measure of profitability, there
would be no need for the Hay system.

In
fact, as we might expect, the system embodies a number of normative or
evaluative presuppositions which are only thinly concealed by a putatively
impartial rationale. Head work is routinely assigned more Hay points than hand
work. Any position requiring its holder to direct or control the performance of
others is valued especially highly. It is not too simple to say that the Hay
Company has constructed an index designed to confirm and legitimate the greater
worth and hence higher salaries of the positions at the top of the executive
ladder, by assigning the greatest weight to whatever talents, skills, traits of
character, or modes of activity are in fact performed by those executives.

But
how could it be otherwise? During the Culture Revolution, the Chinese
counterparts of the Hay Company dictated an alternative set of evaluations,
declaring manual labor to be superior to mental labor, and so forth. The result
may have been morally superior – I leave that to your own judgment – but it was
not, and could not be, more ‘objective.’

As
should be obvious, the existence in actual operation of practical systems of
job evaluation like that of the Hay Company constitutes a continuing source of
rueful embarrassment to conservative business men, like my brother-in-law,
whose politics incline them to look askance at the demands by organized women
workers for equal pay for comparable worth. One cannot operate the Hay system
and claim that the concept of comparable worth is economically meaningless
without badly fouling one’s own nest! Nevertheless, the real thrust of my
remarks is that my brother-in-law is right. Any system for the indexing of
incommensurable tasks presupposes a set of normative or evaluative assumptions.
Bringing those assumptions to light does not permit us to eliminate them, for
without them we have no way of carrying out the indexing process.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

With this post, I begin a three-part posting of the essay I wrote in 1985 for delivery at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. The paper appears to have been prepared as part of a panel duscussing a recent book by James Buchanan, who the next year won the Nobel prize in Economics for his work on public choice, but I confess that I have compeletly forgotten the details.THE INDEXING PROBLEM PART ONE

Professor
Buchanan has explicated for us, both in his paper today and in the book which
this session serves to celebrate, the limitations of the sorts of unanimity
partial orderings to which Vilfredo Pareto has given his name. In my remarks
today, I should like to explore some of the ways in which economists and
philosophers have sought to extend the scope of inter-systematic comparisons, and
to suggest reasons for believing that intersystemic comparisons must always
implicitly or otherwise embody some evaluative presuppositions. My thesis is
one more instance of a much broader theme, to which I have many times returned
in writing and teaching, namely that supposedly value-neutral models of formal
analysis usually contain powerful unacknowledged value assumptions which shape
their formal structure as well as their substantive content.

The
problem with unanimity partial orderings is that although they are transitive,
they are not complete. If everyone at our picnic prefers chocolate ice cream to
vanilla, then we can be sure that switching the dessert from vanilla to
chocolate will produce an increase in social welfare, assuming that everything
else remains unchanged, and that there are no externalities. Furthermore, if we
all prefer vanilla to pistachio as well, then the transitivity of individual
preference guarantees that we will all prefer chocolate to pistachio, and therefore
a switch of the dessert from pistachio to chocolate must increase social
welfare.But suppose some of us prefer
chocolate to vanilla and the rest prefer vanilla to chocolate. How shall we
evaluate the move from vanilla to chocolate, as a collective or group
decision?

Obviously,
it becomes necessary, at the very least, to ask how much the chocolate lovers prefer chocolate to vanilla, and the
vanilla lovers vanilla to chocolate. Some cardinal measure of preference
intensity, pleasure, welfare, preference priority, or even, a la Plato and
Mill, the relative objective value of the desire for chocolate versus the
desire for vanilla, will have to be invoked if we are to aggregate the
preferences or desires of the individuals at the picnic into a single group
ranking suitable for the making of a collective social choice. In short, we
shall have to define an index.

Bentham
assumed that pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil, and that pleasure
and pains, no matter whom they afflict, are intersubjectively comparable and
hence commensurable. These assumptions do not, of themselves, suffice for the
construction of an index, of course. It was still necessary for Bentham to
stipulate an aggregation rule or, in the modern jargon, a social welfare
function. His version of utilitarianism is just such a rule. We might state it
in modern terms something like this:

1. As between two policies, actions, or states of
affairs, A and B, if B provides to each individual in the society at least as
much net happiness as does A, and if there is at least one person to whom B
provides more net happiness than does A, then assign B a higher index number
than A.

2.As between two policies, actions, or states
of affairs, A and B, one of which provides more net happiness to some
individuals and the other of which provides more net happiness to other
individuals, measure the amounts of happiness accorded by each alternative to
each individual, using the same scale of measurement. Then [this, strictly
speaking, is the aggregation or indexing rule], following the rule ‘everybody
to count for one, nobody for more than one,’ add the quantities of net
happiness accorded by each alternative to all the individuals in the society,
and assign to A or B whichever has the larger sum.

We
are accustomed, in the light of the New Welfare Economics of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, to focus our attention on the phrase,
‘using the same scale of measurement,’ and then to invoke the supposed logical
impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility as a reason for rejecting
classical utilitarianism. But as Sen, Suppes, Harsanyi, and a number of other
theorists have shown us, there are ways of getting around the problems of
interpersonal comparisons which pose no greater philosophical difficulties than
the extreme solipsism that generates the problem in the first place. The real
problem is the purely normative clause, ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for
more than one.’ We can defend the assumption that the welfare of the society
consists in the arithmetic sum of the welfares of its individual members only
by positing the moral and political premise that all individuals are equally
important, or that each individual's happiness deserves to be given equal weight
in the social sum.And this premise simply
begs all of the questions of policy that utilitarianism was designed to
resolve.

Let
us take a look, now, at a number of practical and theoretical contexts in which
the indexing problem arises. My aim is to show you that in each case, a
resolution of the problem requires a normative or prescriptive premise which
must be exogenously introduced, as economists like to say.

My
first example is drawn from the work of John Raw1s. Raw1s, you will recall,
undertakes to extract a normative principle of distributive justice from
non-normative, or minimally normative, premises, by means of the conceptual
device of a bargaining game among rationally self-interested agents. In order
to avoid certain theoretical difficulties which stand in the way of his establishing
the principle that he wishes to promulgate, Raw1s introduces into his
theoretical construction a limitation on the knowledge available to the
participants in the bargaining game which he labels ‘the veil of ignorance.’

Unfortunately,
the veil of ignorance deprives the players in the game of so much information
that they no longer have any rational reason to care about its outcome. So
Raw1s is forced to re-equipped them with knowledge that they have coherent life–plans
whose fulfillment they are rationally committed to pursuing. But even this
information is insufficient, for what one wishes to bargain for depends on what
in particular one has chosen as a life plan. Hence Raw1s must add the notion of
primary goods, which is to say those things – ‘rights and liberties,
opportunities and powers, income and wealth’ – which, as he says ‘ a rational
man wants whatever else he wants.’ The idea is simply that no matter what life
plan one turns out to have chosen, possession of these primary goods will serve
to advance it.

But
now the indexing problem rears its head. Clearly, as between two principles of
distributive justice, A and B, if B promises at least as much of each primary
good as does A, and more of at least one, then B is to be preferred to A. But
suppose B promises more opportunity and less wealth, or greater income but less
power. How then shall the rational man behind the veil of ignorance choose? [I
say ‘rational man,’ because as a careful reader of A THEORY OF JUSTICE will
discover, Raw1s' world contains only men.] The answer is to construct an index
of primary goods. It is this number which the individuals in the original
position bargain over.

Although
Rawls is aware of the problems of indexing, he glosses over them, admitting
that we must ‘rely on our intuitive capacities.’ Nevertheless, he stands by the
fundamental claim on which his entire philosophy rests, namely that his theory
allows him’ to replace moral judgments by those of rational prudence…’ [THEORY
OF JUSTICE p. 94]

Raw1s’
actual discussion of the indexing problem is arbitrary in the extreme. First he
stipulates, with very little ground, that bargainers in the original position
will choose to make rights and liberties lexically prior to all other primary
goods. This has the effect of eliminating the need for an index that aggregates
rights and liberties with the other primary goods, for lexical priority
stipulates that any increase in rights and liberties, however small, will take
precedence, for example, over any loss of wealth or income, however large.

This
still leaves the problem of aggregating wealth and income with opportunities
and powers. Since this is manifestly impossible – how, for example, shall we
compare an increase of ten percent in the opportunity to pursue a medical
career as against a decrease in income of five thousand dollars a year? – Rawls
make yet another simplifying assumption. Reminding us that the Difference
Principle concerns itself primarily with the least well-off representative man,
Rawls simply asserts that the least advantaged tend to have both the least
wealth and income and the least powers and opportunities. In Short, Raw1s
assumes away any indexing problem at all.

But
clearly the issue is not so simple resolved. One of the major points of
controversy in modern social welfare policy concerns precisely the
relationship, in the lives of the least advantaged, of income or power. Radical
critics of current welfare practices have argued that transfer payments,
particularly payments in kind, have the effect of depriving the poor of social
and political power, and indeed may even have that as their purpose. Hence, as
between two social policies, one of which increases the income of the least
advantaged while making them impotent clients of the welfare bureaucracy, the
other of which increases economic or political power but at the cost of a
lowered income, it becomes a matter of substantive and evaluative social
philosophy which to espouse.

Rawls himself has
finally recognized the inescapably normative element in his notion of life
plans and primary goods. In a recent volume of essays titled UTILITARIANISM AND
BEYOND, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, Rawls returns to the
subject in an essay on ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods.’ In the following
passages, Rawls virtually acknowledges that the formation of an index of
primary goods presupposes normative constraints on what will count as an
acceptable life plan.

Imagine two persons,
one satisfied with a diet of milk, bread and beans, while the other is
distraught without expensive wines and exotic dishes. In short one has
expensive tastes, the other does not. If the two principles of justice are
understood in their simplest form (as I assume here), then we must say, the
objection runs, that with equal incomes both are equally satisfied. But this is
plainly not true…. The reply is that as moral persons citizens have some part
in forming and cultivating their final ends and preferences. It is not by
itself an objection to the use of primary goods that it does not accommodate
those with expensive tastes. One must argue in addition that it is
unreasonable, if not unjust, to hold such persons responsible for their preferences
and to require them to make out as best they can. But to argue this seems to
presuppose that citizens’ preferences are beyond their control as propensities
or cravings which simply happen.

And Rawls continues:

The idea of holding
citizens responsible for their ends is plausible, however, only on certain
assumptions. First, we must assume that citizens can regulate and revise their
ends and preferences in the light of expectations of primary goods. [And so
forth]

In
short we can hope to arrive at a usable definition of an index of primary goods,
only if we require that our prudentially self-interested bargainers constrain
their life-plans by considerations of fairness and, as Rawls says a bit later
in the same essay, the higher-order interests of moral persons.’ I think we can
fairly conclude that Rawls has failed, in his own words, ‘to replace moral
judgments by those of rational prudence.’

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Tomorrow I shall start posting the paper I mentioned,
"The Indexing Problem," in sections.It should take three days in all to post.Today, I am going to say a few words about
the background of the paper, which is one small part of what I now realize has
been a theme of much of my work for more than half a century, and which came to
be the central focus of what I think of as my Middle Years -- the late 1970's
to the early 1990's.

As long ago as 1962, I became aware of the many ways in
which modes of social analysis, especially as expressed in mathematical form, conceal
normative presuppositions, thus passing themselves off as value neutral or
objective.Indeed, I came to believe
that this presentation of the normative as value neutral is the distinguishing
mark of what is usually called ideology.

My very first attempt to explore this idea took the form of
a book manuscript growing out of my deep engagement in the nuclear disarmament
movement of the 1950's and 60's.That
manuscript, The Rhetoric of Deterrence,
was deemed unpublishable by the presses to which I showed it, but it can be
found online at box.net, accessible by following the link at the top of this
blog page.Even at that very early date,
when I was not yet thirty, I had begun trying to bring into useful conjunction the
insights of philosophy, literary criticism, and mathematical economics.No doubt this will sound strange, and I am
not aware of anyone else, with the notable exception of Karl Marx, who has ever
undertaken such a fusion, but to this day I remain convinced that this approach
is the only proper way to understand the complexity of human society.Indeed, it is this, more than anything else,
that I have learned from my long engagement with Marx's writings.

In 1975, I offered a graduate course on "The Use and
Abuse of Formal Models in Political Philosophy."My analysis in that course of Robert Nozick's
Anarchy, State, and Utopia eventually
was published in the Arizona Law Review
[see box.net] and my lectures on Rawls' A
Theory of Justice appeared with Princeton University Press as Understanding Rawls. I argued that Nozick and Rawls used the
formalism of Game Theory to lend an air of objectivity to what were, in both
cases, unacknowledged and inadequately defended normative presuppositions.

Two years later, I offered a graduate seminar on
"Classics of Critical Social Theory," devoted to works by Marx, Freud, and Mannheim.In preparation for the seminar, I re-read
Volume One of Capital, which I had first
read in 1960 in preparation for a Sophomore tutorial at Harvard that I was
co-teaching with Barrington Moore, Jr.Reading Capital this time
around was a revelatory experience.I
had what I can only describe as an eclairecissement,
a sudden insight into the rich complexity of Marx's analysis of capitalist
economy and society.It seemed to me
that there was an essential connection, never adequately understood by his commentators
and disciples, between Marx's formal economic analysis of capitalism, his critique
of the mystifying forms and appearances of bourgeois society, and the
extraordinary language in which he expressed his insights, language that stood
in marked contrast to the language of the Classical Political Economists [the
Physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo] whom Marx conceived himself to be both building on
and subjecting to critique.

With great good fortune, I had a one-semester sabbatical
leave in the Spring of 1978 [one of only three sabbatical leaves in my fifty
years of teaching].After a month spent
teaching myself Linear Algebra, I launched on an intensive study of
mathematical economics, concentrating on a series of brilliant books written by
a world-wide network of economists devoted to rendering Marx's insights in modern
mathematical form.Rather quickly, I
formulated a grand plan for a systematic reinterpretation of Marx's economic
theories, bringing into fruitful conjunction philosophical, mathematical,
economic, literary, historical, and sociological methods and insights. I began reading widely in the voluminous
writings of Marx and Friederich Engels, including not only such juvenile works
as The Holy Family [a real hoot, if
you have a taste for a send-up of Hegel] but also volume after volume of the
letters Marx and Engels exchanged over the many years of their collaboration.

Eventually, I decided to sort my thoughts out in the form of
a trilogy [my first wife and my good friend Robert Ackermann persuaded me that
there was not much of a market for a single book that was half literary
criticism and half mathematical economics.]The first volume in the projected series was Understanding Marx, my reconstruction and simplification of the mathematical
economists' rendering of Capital.The second volume, delivered at UMass as a
series of Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa lectures, appeared as Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.

But Moneybags, if
I may appropriate the lovely phrase of David Hume, fell stillborn from the presses.No one reviewed it and no one read it, so far
as I could make out.By now, America had
gone through eight years of Reagan, and whatever transformative impulse had
ever existed in the late 60's and 70's was extinguished.My disappointment was such that I never wrote
the third volume of the trilogy, in which I had intended to draw together the
themes of the first two volumes and lay out their interconnections.

In the late eighties, however, as Moneybags was being written, I did begin work on that third volume,
and odd though it may sound, my first task was to carry out a careful study of
the history of the development of index numbers.Index numbers?Why index numbers?Indeed, what are index numbers?

What, first.Index
numbers are one-dimensional measures of a multi-dimensional aggregate.The Consumer Price Index is an index
number.The Unemployment Rate is an index
number.A brief explanation, for those
to whom this is not, as the saying goes, mother's milk.There are thousands upon thousands of
commodities offered regularly in markets, and their prices vary a good deal
from day to day or year to year.A loaf
of bread [but then, there are countless kinds and brands of bread], a jug of
wine [Merlot, Cabernet, Sauvignon Blanc?], and even thou [sex being, after all,
a commodity with its market price.]The
prices of commodities do not move in lockstep.From Monday to Tuesday, grapes may go up, bread may go down, and Corn
Flakes may remain unchanged in price.What, if anything, can we say about "the movement of prices"
in the face of such complexity of fluctuation?The answer is an Index.Economists, after careful study of consumer behavior, design an
imaginary market basket of goods and services meant to reflect the
"typical" or "average" or "customary" mix of
items that consumers spend their money on.They then sample prices at a large number of retail stores to discover
what that notional market basket would cost on a given day.Changes in that price are said then to reveal
"the movement of prices."If
the price of a market basket of goods and services increases by 3% from last
January 12th to today, while the goods and services themselves remain unchanged
in quality and quantity, then prices are said to have undergone a 3% rise, and
the headlines the next day read "inflation running at 3%."

Now, it takes very little wit at all to realize that an
index of this sort has a great deal of arbitrariness built into it.There are in fact probably very few
households that spend their money for just precisely the collection of goods
and services in the economist's notional market basket.If meat prices soar, do vegetarians
experience sharp inflation?Presumably
not.If I own my own home and have no
intention of moving, peaks and valleys in housing prices are without significance
to me.

Strange as it may sound, this commonplace observation,
suitably expanded and complicated, holds the key to the proper analysis of the
ideological encoding of our cognitive appropriation of social reality.[God, don't you just love to write phrases
like that?]Eventually, I came to the
conclusion that there is no social reality that is objective, value-neutral,
and independent of our ideological representations.Because society is a collective human
product, and because we unavoidably employ concepts in appropriating that
social reality that are normatively encoded, society itself is inevitably
mystified.Even those of us who have
fought our way to a knowledge of this fact are incapable of separating
ourselves from our ideological awareness.Not even Marx, had he lived to see a socialist society [from my mouth to
God's ear!], could ever have managed to experience society as other than
mystified.

Well, all of that is the background to the little paper I am
going to start posting tomorrow, a paper I wrote in 1985 just when I was giving
the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.